How do you upgrade the UX of a legacy product like Access without pissing off everyone? You can't. Old habits die hard. Modernizing or changing any fundamental UX in Access is probably a very unpopular choice within their current userbase and likely more expensive than starting from scratch.
It's simpler to go and copy Airtable which is already proven to be a successful model/UX and let that product cannibalize the market of your legacy products.
Incrementally.
Was hiding the file menu items behind a round logo that looked nothing like a button part of that improved UI?
Is the current file menu that looks like the rest of the menus but behaves totally different part of the improved UI?
There was no way that wasn't going to piss off a very vocal segment of users, and Microsoft, to their detriment, badly botched the messaging.
My go-to example is how the File menu was hidden behind a non-button that looked just like a fancy application logo.
Why would an actual, caring ux developer do that in a flagship product?
I like the ribbon today, and I complained when it was released. And I stand by that complaint, I think pushback against change serves an important role, and developers should feel pain when making UX changes.
It's not just a matter of some changes being bad, even when they're good there's a cost. My grandparents both had iPhones, loved them and loved learning to do different things on them. Whenever I'd visit they'd have a laundry list of things they wanted to learn to do. Over time, that list was slowly supplanted by relearning how to do things they once knew, but had changed. It was extremely frustrating because so much of it was near-pointless. Easy for me (and most of their test-base, I'm sure) to relearn, but very difficult for nonagenarians.
This is simply an issue of creating generational products that adapt to the new ways your demographics are using technology. You can incrementally change a product but you will never be able to use new interaction patterns in a product that is used by people who don't know them and don't want to learn them.
Generation Z and Generation Alpha kids are not going to use Access. They will be using this or whatever succeeds this. That's for sure.
This is the same reason why Apple is going full steam into making the iPad its core productivity and creativity device. Newer generations have way better dexterity when using touch as an input, than let's say my generation (millennials). They know Macbooks are products with a UX expiration date.
I mean, flat out removing something, by definition, is not incremental.
I learned to use a computer with a physical keyboard and mouse. My nephew’s first and main computing device was an iPad. That definitely makes a difference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAeybdD5UoQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTx3G6h2xyA
I already have enough trouble with a piano with clear groupings to help find notes. I don't think I would get far with one of these.
Carpet industry is infamous for this, employing kids for their 'nimble fingers' for manipulating delicate knots.
However, question is the same generation who are dexterous in editing TikTok video on mobile phone will grow up and loose dexterity. So, are we talking about new interface paradigm for only kids (and not any specific generation - X, Y or Z)?
Perhaps until you try them with tools like scissors, or manipulating objects like a piece of string?
I think Dexterity implies good skills with a wide range of affordances (not just with a touch interface).
Where they dropped the ball was the core engine and capabilities.
What people wanted was quick & easy way to produce HTML5 forms and tables, but with the power of a native GUI app.
Meanwhile, Microsoft was removing features from Access, such as the SQL Server based "Access Data Projects" (ADP) mode, which was much more scalable than the legacy Jet database mode.
Spot on. As with all things, Microsoft-of-the-time saw the web as a competitor to its products, not a new platform.
They actually could have built substantial portions of Office 365 (which is to say, cloud -first and -integrated Office) in the early 2000s, but tried to protect their legacy businesses.
It's nice to see them finally getting there, but Access-to-Web would still be a killer product for much of Enterprise, if they could solve the data source connectivity issues in a clean way for users.
1) Modern UI's I didn't need to write myself
2) Automation with and transactional atomic write guarantees
3) An extensible and scalable sharing model
Although I didn't try dynamics. I'm guessing it's a suitable alternative.
Admittedly, in that last one they actually just upgraded Visual Studio Online to turn it into Azure Devops and added new features.
Make a new opt-in UX supporting the same backend features (meaning that you need new features to support both) and maintain both. But it's expensive, so eventually you hope to merge them or kill one, which is where the risk of people getting pissed off arises again. GMail/Inbox, for example.
It's a very profitable strategy, though perhaps less charismatic.
Other companies do this too, but I've seen few tech companies as good at copy, defeat, repeat as Microsoft.
In this same vein, they rarely try to take an old product and radically update it (at least not with success).
Partially because it's harder to make an exact copy of a new software concept with an existing technology.
They prefer to abandon existing products. (Unless the computing industry at large still gives the space mindshare, or the profits are too delicious to let go of.)
As I think about it....
It's sort of like Fortune 500 level FOMO...
Disclosure: I used to work at Microsoft. Love the company. But get irritated that their strategy often seems capricious -- chasing the latest industry squirrel.
Alas. I'm still angry Microsoft reneged on the promised migration path from workgroup to client/server.
Like the people burned by Google's abandonment of beloved product & projects, I will never again trust Microsoft enough to actually use their stuff voluntarily. I'm fresh out of goodwill. (Much as I like SQL/Server, my projects have always had a Plan B.)
It's a weird one because on the one side, backwards compatibility is / has been keeping Microsoft behind for years. On the other, it's why so many companies trust them.
Joel jokes about it here.
Or maybe they were right to protect the enterprises with big legacy investments and will have relatively little trouble leveraging their entrenched position and vast resources to make a good-enough player in the new market once someone else has proven it to win by greater integration with Microsoft’s existing services.
I mean, that's been a fairly consistent (though not 100% so) recipe for success for Microsoft for quite a while.
Disclaimer: work there, but my views..